Monday, July 30, 2012

I know this is a little late, but I have a normal day job! I try to get this stuff up right after shows, however I have to follow up on opportunities, orders and general communication with new vendors. Tradeshow season is a very busy time and I am going to try and bring you trip reports for all my travels like I have in the past. Right now I am doing this OutDoor Friedrichshafen report, but next week is Outdoor Retailer in Salt Lake City and then Surf Expo is in Orlando the first week of September. Keep your eyes set on White-Knuckled for more trip reports and awesome gear reviews.

OutDoor Friedrichshafen is an amazing tradeshow. It is the preeminent summer tradeshow in Europe. It is Summer Outdoor Retailer in Salt Lake City Utah every summer, but multiplied by 10. There are many of the American brands represent at the show, Marmot, Mountain Hardwear, Big Agnes, Kelty, etc., but the European brands take over a massive amount of the show, not to mention many of the brands you may have never heard of. For example, Edelrid is not that well known in the USA, but they are a combination of Black Diamond, Sterling and Petzl over in Europe. Their booth is huge and their product range is immense. They innovate at the rate of a technology company and have been around for 150+ years. There are countless brands like this including Norrona, Haglofs, Mammut, Millet, Salewa and many more. The technical prowess of these European brands far outweighs that of the American market and that is why Sierra Trading Post attends OutDoor in Europe. It allows us to bring a different flavor of product to our American customer base.

Some of the best product I saw had to be at Haglofs and Edelrid. Haglofs has completely redesigned and re-colored their apparel. You can see from the photo below that Europe definitely influenced the color shift in America that Marmot and Mountain Hardwear have embraced over the last couple years. Haglofs, Norrona, Millet and others pioneered the color shift starting back in 2008 or so and it has really caught on in the last couple seasons. You will see these new colors for the apparel and gear starting this fall. Edelrid also had some new product. They have innovated on almost every piece of gear that a climber would take out climbing, from harnesses to ropes to belay devices. You will see some crazy product in the next few months from Edelrid. They have a new 6.9mm twin rope and a couple new belay devices. The first is the Mega Jul, a belay device for larger ropes and the Micro Jul which is meant for smaller ropes down to a diameter of...6.9mm. The really interesting and new thing about these devices is that they are normal tube style ATC belay devices, but they are auto locking?!?!?! Yes, Edelrid has built a normal ATC style belay device that acts like a Petzl Grigri or a Trango Cinch. They had a testing setup for the belay devices and they were dropping weights with the Jul's connected and they were auto locking the falls. Crazy stuff!!!

This was a very long show and I was extremely busy, but below are a few videos that I took while walking around the show and one video from Black Diamond's Vimeo account page. Some pretty cool stuff, so take a look.

Camalot X4 — coming Spring 2013 from Black Diamond Equipment on Vimeo.The show was incredibly fun and very productive, but to go through everything would take forever. These are some highlights and I hope you enjoy the content. Look for my trip report on Summer Outdoor Retailer the second week of August. Leave some comments and let me know what you think.